Reader style: business decision maker
How the presentation principles change for a reader who will decide. It has three parts: who the reader is, the overrides, and what is open.
Who
- Reader: someone who will decide on what the presentation asks: an investor, a buyer or a manager. They open the deck, or sit in the room, to decide.
- Expertise: expert in their own criteria, often a novice in the speaker's topic.
- Medium: a room or a screen. The deck may be read without a speaker.
- Reading mode: scanning for the answer and the ask; a deck is read in about three minutes (DocSend 2022).
Overrides
The base is the academic talk. The business context changes few rules, and each row keeps its grade. Weakest rows: the memo and the story-with-number. Strongest row: the team and preparedness content (Bernstein 2017), though it concerns the first screen of an email.
| Principle | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A talk is not a paper | open with the answer and the ask: the recommendation, the decision wanted, then the support (pyramid, SCQ for the setup) | Britt 2003 (short arguments, full text); Minto 2026, Millerd 2025 (practice); Clark 2008 (angels judged clarity and structure). Convention for decks and talks; supported with caveat for short texts |
| (content) | choose content for the decider's criteria: the team, the preparedness behind the numbers, the market; show readiness to answer | Bernstein 2017 (team drove interest on average, full text); Chen 2009, Pollack 2012 (preparedness); DocSend 2022 (team slide in 100% of decks, successful or not: a prevalence count, not evidence that it decides). Measured for the screening stage; supported with caveat otherwise |
| Gesture with the words | treat the presenter as part of the pitch: angels weighed delivery without saying so (Clark 2008) and presenter gender and attractiveness moved choice (Brooks 2014); rehearse delivery as content | Clark 2008; Brooks 2014. Supported with caveat (angels); measured (Brooks 2014, US pitch competitions) |
| Plan the questions | plan the Q&A as part of the decision: expect prevention-focused questions and prepare promotion-focused answers | Kanze 2018. Measured |
| No script on screen | for a deck read without a speaker, the deck is a document: sentence headlines carry the claim for a reader who scans in about three minutes, and fuller text on a slide is allowed | Yates 2007 (secondary); Ginns 2005 and Adesope 2012 (held; system pacing only); DocSend 2022 (sample not stated). Inference, partly unread sources (Yates 2007 not verified; Ginns 2005 full text); untested on decks |
| A talk is not a paper | the reader's or the room's time sets the length; design the first slides to stand alone | DocSend 2022 (just under three minutes; unsuccessful decks left at 2:13; sample not stated). Descriptive, owner's data, sample not stated |
| (medium) | a written narrative read at the start of the meeting is an accepted alternative to slides for decision meetings | Bezos 2018 (held, 10.5); Tufte 2022 (5, example only). Convention, untested |
| (evidence) | pair the number with a short case where the aim is action: numbers for belief, story for intent | Zebregs 2015 (health setting); no business test. Supported with caveat (health), untested in business |
Thresholds
None changed.
Open questions
- No experiment compares answer first with background first for a business talk or deck.
- No experiment compares a memo with a deck for comprehension or decision quality.
- Executive and board briefings, and sales presentations: no study found.
- Colour, motion and font size for business: no difference found against the base.
- Kept unchanged here: the sentence headline with a figure as evidence, one claim per slide, legible type and colour not the only cue, rehearsal, a handout of its own, gesture, and segmenting.